What a n00b! http://whatan00b.com Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:09:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 Running Commands as Another User in a Script http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/InD2864WI_w/running-commands-as-another-user-in-a-script http://whatan00b.com/running-commands-as-another-user-in-a-script#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:21:59 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=905

There’s plenty of situations where you need to to open a shell to run something as a different user within a script. Scripts like the Zimbra start-stop scripts can’t be run using sudo (Honestly, I don’t know why and haven’t questioned it). For my script, the root user doesn’t have the zmcontrol utility in its path, so it had to actually spawn a shell as the zimbra user to run. Since it wasn’t terribly obvious after a few minutes of googling, I decided to post how I did it. My example uses the zmcontrol utility which has to be run as the zimbra user:

su -l -c "zmcontrol start" zimbra

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/running-commands-as-another-user-in-a-script/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/running-commands-as-another-user-in-a-script Gmail Gets Drag-and-Drop http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/cQiX7Tx0KCE/gmail-gets-drag-and-drop http://whatan00b.com/gmail-gets-drag-and-drop#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:45:37 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=897

gmail-drag-n-drop I love the Gmail interface, but one of the things that I miss going from my Zimbra accounts at work to Gmail is that there’s no drag-and-drop. Well, that all changed when I logged into my account today. I don’t know that I would call drag-and-drop in a web email client a killer feature, necessarily, but as Google works to make web applications feel more like desktop applications, features like drag-and-drop will become more and more important. I was actually surprised that it took this long for them to bring this feature to Gmail. In a world where the push is to mix cloud and desktop applications, having these interfaces the same is going to be crucial.

The drag-and-drop interface does leave a bit to be desired as you actually have to grab a handle to the left of the message rather than just grabbing the message itself, but it’s something. I would expect that you would be able to just click and hold on either the subject or the sender within the interface to grab the message as this is the behavior in most desktop clients, but we will see.

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/gmail-gets-drag-and-drop/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/gmail-gets-drag-and-drop Oh Be Careful Little Mind What You Think http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/rEumsBba-W4/oh-be-careful-little-mind-what-you-think http://whatan00b.com/oh-be-careful-little-mind-what-you-think#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:01:15 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=894

You better start working now on controlling the urge to think about running that annoying coworker over or running into that guy that just cut you off in traffic. Toyota, today, showed off its new thought-controlled wheelchair. The user wears a cap that monitors for certain brain waves every 125 milliseconds which is pretty much instantaneous to a human. The person basically just thinks about moving an arm or a leg to instruct the wheelchair to move.

Toyota hasn’t said when this product will hit the consumer market, but it will certainly be one to watch as that seems to be the new forefront of computer and device interfaces.

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/oh-be-careful-little-mind-what-you-think/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/oh-be-careful-little-mind-what-you-think Human Body OS 2.0: 15 Must-Have Features http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/60qiR0epEEQ/human-body-os-2-0-15-must-have-features http://whatan00b.com/human-body-os-2-0-15-must-have-features#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:51:45 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=892

Well, God did a pretty good job with the Human OS 1.0. It’s done quite well for us for some time, but let’s face it, it’s time for an upgrade. While it hasn’t made it public exactly when Human 2.0 will debut, but the newest firmware should account for much-needed changes in the now out-of-date Human 1.0 firmware with some new features that we have learned from experience from the computing industry.

better logging (see syslog)
Pain is about as worthless as an error message on your computer screen reading just: “error”. Sometimes it takes a doctor just to figure out what in the world is wrong with your body. Having some better logging would just be much easier and more efficient.

kill
I’m not talking about killing other humans. When I go to sleep at night and can’t stop thinking about some event the next day or one that happened that day, I just want to make it stop. Being able to manually kill off a process would make things much easier.

search (see Spotlight)
While it’s not the best practice, good search can overcome the worst of organization skills. When I’m having problems remembering something, why can’t I just search for it?

a good antivirus
Like a good ol’ Windows 98 machine hooked directly to the public Internet, our bodies are susceptible to all kinds of viruses. A good antivirus would help increase uptime due to stupid things like viruses.

delete
Sometimes you see or hear things you just didn’t need nor want to hear. Having the ability to remove those unwanted memories would be awesome.

better multi-threading for males
Guys don’t multitask. If they say they do they’re lying. I know because I am one. With all the devices and thing competing for our attention, we as males need better multitasking.

improved process scheduling for females
I wouldn’t know, but I’ve heard and learned that females spend most of their time multitasking. I know sometimes I wish that my wife was able to just turn off thoughts about certain problems to not think about them for a while.

file sharing
Have you ever had to share memories or strategy with people in those archaic, analog fashions like speaking, writing, or typing? That’s just ridiculous. We need to be able to just open up a file share to let others grab that data for their use.

video chat / screen sharing
Let’s face it, sometimes there’s just no substitute for being there. Being able to share experiences with others as we see them is sometimes necessary for them to understand how we feel. Otherwise we have to resort to those old-school, ridiculous processes I mentioned above.

a good firewall
Sometimes people are just annoying. Sure, you can do your best to ignore them, but it takes resources for our brains to process who they are and what they’re saying before deciding to ignore them. Having a firewall in place could help eliminate the need for those unnecessary time wasters.

live migration (see vMotion)
Ever been working on a project at work and had to leave, only to realize that the person coming in needed to get brought up to speed? Imagine if you could just vMotion that project to the co-worker who was coming in to fill your spot. Your project wouldn’t be slowed down a bit, nor would you miss that important lunch date.

process delegation (see Xgrid)
This is possible in the human 1.0 firmware, but through a much more manual process. Once again we have to use these antiquated processes like talking and typing to delegate tasks. Automatically handing out tasks would speed things up for sure.

better battery life
Eight hours of down time every day?! That will never hold up, even with the most lax of SLAs. Good uptime will be key for human 2.0 to be a success.

people management (see Group Policy)
It would be far more efficient if we could just set policies to not allow humans to break laws than to pay police to be sure humans are caught if they break laws. This would also be helpful for parents, teachers and cult leaders.

copy-paste
Why should we constantly be trying to read things and memorize them? Let’s just copy-paste them into text files to search and share with others.

What about you? Are there any features that we need in Human OS 2.0 that you use every day on your computer?

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/human-body-os-2-0-15-must-have-features/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/human-body-os-2-0-15-must-have-features Constant Disk Activity from MythTV http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/AbPneUlPEns/constant-disk-activity-from-mythtv http://whatan00b.com/constant-disk-activity-from-mythtv#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:20:00 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=887

Last night I was playing with my MythTV box setting up a frontend on my MacBook and I noticed after I was done playing that the MythTV backend server’s disk was constantly making noise. When I stopped the MythTV backend services, the noise stopped. Then once I started it back up the activity continue the way it was before. After doing a little Googling, I found out that others had had this problem on Ubuntu 8.04 shortly after installing MythTV. Later in the bug report someone discovered that on their machine, the constant disk activity was MythTV logging that it couldn’t connect to the MySQL server. Turns out they were exactly right. In my /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log file, it was constantly writing:
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2009-06-26 23:50:02.359 DB Error (KickDatabase):
Query was:
SELECT NULL;
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
QSqlQuery::prepare: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2009-06-26 23:50:02.412 DB Error (SimpleDBStorage::load()):
Query was:
SELECT station FROM record WHERE recordid = :WHERERECORDID
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
2009-06-26 23:50:02.413 Unable to connect to database!
2009-06-26 23:50:02.414 Driver error was [1/1045]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to connect
Database error was:
Access denied for user 'mythtv'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Turns out, I had been messing with the MySQL permissions to get my MythTV frontend machine to work and hadn’t noticed that I broke the backend. If you install MythTV and notice that you get constant disk access after it starts, this is likely the culprit.

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/constant-disk-activity-from-mythtv/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/constant-disk-activity-from-mythtv Evernote Gets Sharing http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/vgbB7SwdNJk/evernote-gets-sharing http://whatan00b.com/evernote-gets-sharing#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:31:48 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=884

Everyone’s favorite note-taking and syncing application has finally gotten their first implementation of sharing out the door. I’d have to say, that was my biggest issue with Evernote. Otherwise, the app is awesome. It’s a great way to get things off the brain and into the computer so you can come back to them later and not worry about them now. For people with a memory like mine, that’s a wonderful thing. Now, you can share those notes with others selectively as public notebooks have been available for some time.

This is being called “Phase 1″ of sharing by Evernote and the sharing does have a few restrictions in its current implementation. First, the shared notebooks are not available in the desktop client. One does have to log into the web client to see any shared notebooks or manage their shares. Second, sharing is only available to paid subscribers. The subscription price is a measly $5 per month. Not bad for a service that lets you take notes, clip web pages, and pictures and make them available to your Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, Blackberry and a few others via the web interface. It even parses the images for text to make your pictures of docs searchable. I would expect a lot of the killer features of Evernote to become pay-only features, since, well they’ve gotta eat too.

What’s to come with Evernote? They’ve let us know that sharing from the desktop and mobile clients is on its way. Other than that, they’ve left it up to the user community for some new features :)

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/evernote-gets-sharing/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/evernote-gets-sharing Google Voice and the Future of Telephony http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/7voDJBxJLt0/google-voice-and-the-future-of-telephony http://whatan00b.com/google-voice-and-the-future-of-telephony#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:58:22 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=882

When Google announced Google Voice, I looked at it, thought it was intriguing, and kept on my merry way. Now that it’s here and available by invite, I started looking at it and am realizing that it’s much bigger than I originally had thought. It’s not just another VoIP service, it’s a paradigm shift for telephones. It’s doing to phone routing what we have done with email. Your individual phones really just become clients that connect to a central call routing system of some sort.

The idea goes something like this: You have one number to give out to others. That number can ring at your desk at work, your home, and on your mobile phone. Depending upon who’s calling, you could even have it ring your spouse’s phone as well. That’s not a huge paradigm shift from what standard VoIP systems are today, but it allows you to have greater flexibility in using phones from outside your VoIP systems and multiple ones at the same time, meanwhile, adding some pretty sweet features to boot.

In the future, I can see this becoming the standard way of having a phone and simply buying a device to hook into the Internet from what is now your cell phone or home phone provider. Much the way Thunderbird or Outlook or your Blackberry hook into your mail server and pull down all the same mail, your phones simply listen for calls from one centralized place. This idea only makes sense since we really don’t want to have to keep track of multiple numbers and try multiple places to reach someone. We just want to reach them. We do the same with our searches, our documents, and with our emails. Why not with our phone calls?

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/google-voice-and-the-future-of-telephony/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/google-voice-and-the-future-of-telephony WordPress 2.8 Upgrade Ease http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/6UCoD625fO0/wordpress-2-8-upgrade-ease http://whatan00b.com/wordpress-2-8-upgrade-ease#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:39:52 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=880

Well, I just did the Wordpress upgrade from 2.7.1 to 2.8 and I have to say, that’s the easiest upgrade of any CMS I’ve ever done. I’m actually still in shock. I was planning on spending about 15-20 minutes going through making sure all my plugins worked, etc., but not so! I did the automatic upgrade and voila, all done within seconds. That’s all, I just wanted to share the awesomeness that is WordPress :)

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/wordpress-2-8-upgrade-ease/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/wordpress-2-8-upgrade-ease Yet Another Reason Not To Use Outlook http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/TSgcFrvQkSY/yet-another-reason-not-to-use-outlook http://whatan00b.com/yet-another-reason-not-to-use-outlook#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:23:29 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=878

If the slow speed, virus targeting, instability, and clunky interface isn’t enough to deter you from using the trainwreck of a mail client called Outlook (I have no opinion of Outlook :) ), Microsoft has just given you another reason not to use it. Microsoft has announced that it will for sure be using its html rending engine from Word to display html emails. This means that Outlook won’t be able to render html messages using web standards. There’s even a website using Twitter to send Microsoft a message that users don’t want Outlook to break their html messages for years to come. If you don’t believe them, check out the message in both Outlook 2000 (not using Word) and Outlook 2010 (using Word).

It shouldn’t surprise us that Microsoft would pull something like this, but it certainly caught me off guard. I thought that they had learned their lesson and seemed to make progress towards using web standards with Internet Explorer 8, but apparently they’re going to keep doing their own thing. Unbelievable.

Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://whatan00b.com/yet-another-reason-not-to-use-outlook/feed 0 http://whatan00b.com/yet-another-reason-not-to-use-outlook Native Zimbra Syncing to OS X Snow Leopard, But Not The Way We All Thought http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WhatAN00b/~3/Ds7ndZJlNNM/native-zimbra-syncing-to-os-x-snow-leopard-but-not-the-way-we-all-thought http://whatan00b.com/native-zimbra-syncing-to-os-x-snow-leopard-but-not-the-way-we-all-thought#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:38:38 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://whatan00b.com/?p=868

One of the biggest features that Apple is touting of the new version of OS X is native Exchange integration. Native Exchange integration is a great feature for Apple since not even Windows offers it. Being a Zimbra fan, I was hoping that Snow Leopard had implemented this via ActiveSync rather than Exchange’s Web Services. It turns out that this is not the case, but it looks like we may still get native syncing just not the way we all thought.

According to a Zimbra forum thread, this will likely happen via CardDAV and CalDAV. Zimbra has CardDAV support slated for version 6.01 which is supposedly scheduled around the same time as Snow Leopard. One of the new, not-so-hyped features of Snow Leopard is the use of CardDAV for Address Book Server along with (of course) support for CardDAV on the client side. OS X as well as Zimbra have supported CalDav for some time so calendar syncing. While it’s not quite as simple as we would have liked, it appears we’re still getting the native syncing that we were hoping for, just not the way that seemed obvious from the beginning.

Update: As @thebitnix points out, it’s not a bad thing that native sync with Zimbra isn’t happening via the Exchange protocols. It was just unexpected that it would happen via different methods.

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